Captured and sentenced to death by Russia, tortured and a witness to war crimes, a young man from Nottingham spent months waiting for the executioner in a Russian prison, unable to cry.
“I so desperately wanted to, I was trying to force myself to let some emotion out,” he recalls. “But because I was too terrified in that place, I wasn’t able to cry. In five and a half months of captivity, I never cried once. There was moments where I wanted to, but I just physically couldn’t.”
This is Aiden Aslin, a survivor of Russian war crimes himself, speaking to The Independent’s World of Trouble podcast.
His extraordinary life has taken him from working as a carer in Newark, Notts, to fighting with Kurd militia against militants from the so-called Islamic State in Syria, to vicious street fighting under air attack in Ukraine’s besieged Mariupol.
Post captivity, he is now back in Zaporizhzhia in eastern Ukraine and back in the Ukrainian army, which he joined before Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022.
Reflecting on his adopted country’s chances of triumphing in Vladimir Putin’s brutal war which has ground on for nearly four years, he is optimistic.
“I think Russia can be beaten,” he says quietly. “I think we have got the means to exhaust their economy. Obviously, it is not an overnight thing. At some point it is going to give.
“People in Russia are saying that you should end this… The grasp is weakening. There are a lot of things showing that Russia is becoming a lot more destabilised.”
Aslin is not alone in taking up in arms for a country not his own. Thousands of foreign volunteers joined Ukraine’s fight after the Kremlin ordered troops to topple the democratically elected government in Kyiv and try to return Ukraine to the status of a Russian colony.
But few were part of Ukraine’s forces before Putin’s invasion. Aslin, now 31, was among those who had already answered a call that came from within to fight what they saw as injustice.
He was first prompted to leave the UK to fight abroad when he saw on television the massacres of Yezidis by Isis extremists in Syria in 2014, who went on to attempt genocide against the community and enslave hundreds of women.
“I never had any interest in going to Syria. But this was a defining moment in my journey where I decided I could continue to stay at home or stand by my beliefs and morals and actually do something when other people won’t.
“I felt there was a sense of injustice that the West wasn’t doing enough to try and prevent the atrocities that were being committed.”
He joined the Kurdish Peshmerga; a ruthlessly efficient militia supported by the US, UK, France and others with special forces troops, and bombers, in the fight against Isis.
